


Max Returns

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [45]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Post-Canon, Reunions, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 07:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14765132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: just what it says on the label.





	Max Returns

Max’s leaving had bothered her more than she liked to admit. Several times he’d crashed into her dreams, sometimes hunched and feral, sometimes tall and almost smiling and holding out his hand to haul her up out of the Plains of Silence. When she was awake, she found herself leaning on a shoulder that wasn’t there, counting out bullets for two sets of guns, glancing over to see only air where her heart told her a person should be. Furiosa had snapped at anyone who mentioned her lapses in sanity, glowered at Aurelio when he cleared his bird throat and stared back at her pointedly. The truth was that she felt cut in half, even after her ribs had healed and her eye began to open.

She hated him for leaving her to feel this way. She hated that she had come to rely on any human so much, because reliance was foolish in the Wasteland. Everyone leaves, one way or another. But she couldn’t banish the ache that took up residence behind her lungs and settled in her back teeth.

When he’d come flying ( _flying,_ like some myth out of her mother’s stories) from the sky, kicking up dust on the Tower and breathless and daemonless, she hadn’t known until she was standing toe to toe with him whether or not she was going to punch him. A Green Girl had come to fetch her, one of the Dag’s converts, with a black rune inked across both of her pointer fingers, saying that a witch-man had flown into one of the gardens and he would only speak to Furiosa.

He came out of the Wasteland sky. Furiosa had stopped looking, and told herself that she had never _been_ looking. But she had always watched the sands for the glint of a strange vehicle, watched the roads that nomads rode in on sometimes. Watched for the sandy fur of a dingo and the lopsided shoulder-pads of a leather jacket.

She could never have imagined this. No one could, not the Dag or the History Man or the Pups who clung fiercely to the scraps of stories that were all they had left. Seeing him, holding one long branch of cloud pine in a hand like he would break it, Furiosa had felt something in the back of her teeth ease, felt a gear click into place in her chest. She covered the distance between them at a long stride that was not quite a run, her hand coming up – but in the end she opened her fist and ran her palm along the stupid tuft of his hair that kept sticking up the wrong way, leaned her forehead against his and breathed a sigh of relief.

Max had leaned into the touch before he could think about it, stiffening only after that split-second of acceptance, and Furiosa watched his eyes, so close to hers, seeing the scars that ran down his insides in the way he looked at her like she was something deadly. She was, but then he _smiled_ , and reached up with his free hand to cup the back of her skull, and Furiosa thought that she could stand like that for hours, running her fingers through his dusty, outgrown hair.

“You came back,” she said, not knowing what it meant. She had known what his leaving meant, when he left them at the edge of the salt and when he left them at the edge of the lift. She didn’t understand this. And on a living branch of cloud pine, something so ancient and impossible it could only have come from someone like Max.

Max had to try a couple of times before he could speak, opening and closing his mouth, nodding even as he leaned back and looked away. Furiosa let him go, stepped away, flexing the fingers in her metal hand, comforted by the easy give and pull of the wires. “I… thought I might – that you might want this.” He held out the cloud pine, shifting his death grip to something almost reverent, offered to an altar Furiosa had no right to accept.

She reached out anyway, to touch the living wood, to run her whole fingers over the smooth edges of it. And then she closed his hands around the branch, pushed it back towards him. “The girls will want to see it,” Furiosa said, because this was not Joe’s Citadel, Immortan and chrome. But she was not Vuvalini either, a witch with moonlight on her skin. This tree was not for her; she’d rather have the roar of a War Rig under her feet.

Max nodded. He understood, she knew, because he felt the same.


End file.
